You Did What__ Mad Plans and Great Historical Disasters - Bill Fawcett [54]
Why (I hear you ask) was it unpublished?
Because the press floated out to sea before the issue could be printed.
All the phone and telegraph wires were dead by 4:00 P.M., and Galveston was effectively cut off from the rest of the world. By 7:00 P.M. the winds were over 120 miles an hour, and some were as high as 200 miles an hour before midnight. Contact wasn’t reestablished with Galveston for another 28 hours, at 11:30 P.M. on September 9. In the interim, the closest any train had been able to approach the city was SIX miles. Anything beyond that was too dangerous.
When it was over, it was estimated that Galveston had lost between 3,000 and 4,000 houses and buildings.
It was always going to lose them. The people were something else again. If the bureaucrats of the Weather Bureau had simply told the truth, had shared the information they’d been sent from Cuba, had not been so pigheaded in their certainty that no storm could ever damage Galveston…
No one knows exactly how many people died in New York on September 11, 2001. The best estimate is 3,000, out of a population of more than seven million. That comes to four ten-thousandths of one percent.
No one knows exactly how many people died in Galveston on September 8 and 9, 1900. The best estimate is 10,000, out of a population of about 30,000. That comes to 33 percent.
It should be obvious at this point that the destructive force greater than any terrorist’s bomb was an arrogant bureaucracy, not the hurricane. Which is rather a pity as we can at least predict the course of hurricanes.
You Unleashed What?
“Never start something you can’t finish” is an old proverb. A pity that those who think their power is unlimited forget it so often. The Boxer Rebellion took place during the summer of 1900. By the time the conflict was over tens of thousands of people lay dead. The uprising led to the end of the Manchu dynasty and had such a negative impact on the Chinese psyche that it still colors that country’s attitude toward the rest of the world.
TZU HSI, EMPRESS DOWAGER OF CHINA
CHINA, 1900
William C. Dietz
Who screwed up? The answer is Tzu Hsi, the sixty-five-year-old Empress Dowager of China, also known to her subjects as the Old Buddha. When the Boxer Rebellion began, Tzu Hsi had ruled one way or another for nearly half a century. Things had not gone well for the Chinese, starting with their loss of the Opium War in 1840–1842 and continuing with a long list of humiliating concessions as the great powers robbed China of Hong Kong, Manchuria, Burma, what is now Vietnam, and ended their longtime domination of Korea. Germany, Russia, France, Britain, Japan and the United States all took turns carving profitable slices off the once-great empire.
That’s why Tzu Hsi hated the foreigners almost as much as the Boxers did and sought to use the Boxers as the means not only to cleanse China of foreign influence but to preserve the Manchu dynasty. It was a terrible mistake.
The Boxers were a little-known, poorly organized cult that was born of two earlier groups, the Big Swords, which was a group of landlords, farmers and peasants organized to protect themselves from bandits, and the Spirit Boxers, who drew their members from the poorest of the poor, and routinely practiced martial arts in public places. Hence the name Boxers. During their demonstrations members would call upon well-known spirits to enter their bodies and participate in scenes of mass possession. The displays, which incorporated traditional folktales, drew large enthusiastic crowds.
Much like the French underground in World War II, or the shadowy terrorist organizations of today, the movement referred to as the Boxers was actually an amalgamation of smaller groups having no central leadership. Religion, in the form of the traditional gods that practitioners allowed to possess them, plus the Chinese folk operas that they borrowed for use in their demonstrations, allowed